Brand Perception Surveys: Definition, Tips & Sample Questions!

Brand Perception Surveys are crucial for understanding how your product or service is viewed in the market and can provide valuable insights for crafting effective marketing strategies. Sometimes, companies can get lost in the insularity of their own culture. You need to get out there to find the answers you’re looking for.

Leaders at every company are curious about what customers think of their brand. And that’s when a brand perception survey can help you.

With some carefully designed survey questions, you can find the answers to your brand-related questions without having ever to leave the office.

Whether you’re an established brand or an emerging startup, keeping an eye on what your target audience thinks of your brand is always healthy. In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about how to conduct a survey.

What Are Brand Perception Surveys?

A brand perception survey is simply a tool that measures your company’s brand perception in the eyes of your respondents. They’re often used as a metric for marketing and PR campaigns to judge whether you’ve been able to influence your brand perception.

• Brand perception’ refers to what people think about your brand, whether they’re customers, employees, or shareholders.
• Ideally, hearing about your brand brings up specific values and characteristics in people’s thoughts. Successful brands can shape these thoughts to create a positive brand image.

Let’s say, for example, that your brand recently suffered from significant controversy. Your strategy was to let it quiet down and hope that people forget about it.

But how do you measure if this controversy had a lasting impact? By conducting this survey once things have gotten quieter.

Another use case for these surveys is to measure the success of a brand campaign. You’ve invested bucketloads of money in your latest marketing campaign. How do you measure returns on that investment? These surveys will help you find out if there’s been a change in your brand image.

Brand Perception Survey Questions: Free Template

Before distributing your survey, preparing this survey questionnaire is a great idea. Once the questions are listed, you can choose which ones to keep and which to discard. A well-thought-out questionnaire is the first step to conducting such a survey. Here are some questions you can consider including:

Here’s a short brand perception survey created using SurveySparrow.

5 Sample Brand Perception Questions

Here are some brand perception questions that you can include in your brand perception questionnaire.

1. Are you familiar with [your brand]?
2. When you think of [your brand], what comes to mind?
3. Which three words would you use to describe [your brand]?
4. Which of these best describes your last experience with [your brand]?
5. How likely are you to recommend [your brand] to a friend or colleague?

1. Are you familiar with [your brand]?

As a first step, it is important to determine whether the respondent knows about your brand. A huge part of a brand perception survey is, after all, about brand awareness. If you find that many of your respondents aren’t familiar with your brand, that could mean a few things. Either they haven’t discovered your product or service or use it and still don’t associate it with your brand. Either way, it’s good to keep an eye on this number.

2. What comes to mind When you think of [your brand]?

This question is at the heart of every brand perception survey. What thoughts or feelings are associated with your brand? It is important here to give a range of options based on your best guesses. You can also consider having an ‘Other’ option where customers can give open-ended responses. Here is where you find out whether the message you’ve been trying to put across has been communicated.

3. Which three words would you use to describe [your brand]?

If your company has got its marketing on point, the central values of the company can be communicated within three keywords. Your marketing campaigns should be aimed at associating those words with your brand.

With this question, you’ll find out if you’ve been able to create that brand perception. This is an incredibly useful question to have in your surveys.

4. Which of these best describes your last experience with [your brand]?

Here, we’re venturing slightly into measuring customer experience territory. That’s not bad, but you need to decide whether to include this question.

It is relevant to these surveys because brand perception is often rooted in customer experience. It might make your survey longer, though.

If you do keep this question, make sure to be generous with the options you present.

Having just positive responses will inevitably skew your results. It is also a good idea to have an open-ended option with this question.

5. How likely are you to recommend [your brand] to a friend or colleague?

This question helps you find out your Net Promoter Score (NPS), which depends heavily on brand perception. In your surveys, you want to include this question with options from 1-10 to get a concrete score you can work on and compare with past results.

In the social media age, network effects are the central drivers of expansion and customer acquisition. That’s why it’s important to measure your NPS.

When you conduct a brand perception survey, it is relatively low-cost to add an extra question that doesn’t require much effort from the respondents. The better your brand perception, the higher your NPS will be.

Why Are Brand Perception Surveys Important?

These surveys can be helpful for your organization in various ways. Yet, you might have trouble knowing when to do a brand perception survey.

Understanding how they’re useful can help in that regard. Let’s look at a few reasons why these surveys are crucial:

1. Find Out What You’re Communicating

A cafe near my home, run by a man in his 50s. To attract youngsters, he’s put up posters of the TV show Friends and music icon Bob Marley.

When my friends and I talk about the cafe, we agree it’s trying to be cool but a bit cliche. Due to our generation gap, the manager does not know what he’s communicating. As a brand, you must avoid this pitfall.

You can find out what you’re communicating to people through the survey.

The results might surprise you; if they do, that would be good. You always want to have a finger on the pulse regarding your brand image.

2. Design Impactful Marketing Campaigns

When creatives at your company get together to design a marketing campaign, they need to be given specific values and messaging to communicate.

With expensive marketing campaigns, you don’t want just to be shooting in the dark. These surveys can help you narrow down the messaging you want.

Often, marketing campaigns fail because they don’t start from a rigorous base. If customers already know your brand is the cheapest, that’s not what you want to communicate in a new campaign.

You want to emphasize other aspects of your brand. These surveys can help you discover what’s lacking in your brand image.

3. Ascertain Next Steps After A Crisis

In the lifetime of your brand, the likelihood of being part of a controversy increases almost linearly with popularity. If controversies are inevitable, how do we learn how to address them?

Should you do a press release or say nothing? Do you need to invest in initiatives to rebuild your image? It’s a great idea to start with brand perception surveys to know what to do.

If you conduct such a survey, you might find out that customers have moved on and remembered little from the crisis. In that case, you probably don’t need to bring it up again.

On the other hand, it might just be the case that your audience remembers, and that’s getting in the way of them engaging with your brand. Either way, conducting a survey is the first step to finding out.

4 Tips To Conduct A Brand Perception Survey

When it comes to brand perception surveys, there are a few best practices you must follow to be successful. At Surveysparrow, we’re committed to helping you get the most out of your survey.

We’ll go over a survey example as well. But first, here are some tips for your survey:

1. Use Close-Ended Questions

Do you know the difference between open-ended and closed-ended questions? Open-ended questions give respondents a text box to answer however they like—close-ended questions, on the other hand, present options, whether single-choice or multiple-choice.

As a rule of thumb, quantitative surveys rely more heavily on close-ended questions.

In a brand perception survey, you will hopefully not expect a wide range of responses. You should be able to estimate and put the whole range of reactions down as choices.

That’ll help you analyze the data better, ensure your results are meaningful, and reveal actionable insights.

You can always include an optional ‘Is there something else you’d like to tell us?’ at the end of your surveys for more subjective responses.

2. One Question At A Time

This tip is less specific to brand perception surveys and more a best practice for all surveys. You must only ask one question at a time.

This sounds like the simplest idea, but you won’t believe how many people get it wrong. Having two questions in one will skew your survey data and might render the whole exercise meaningless.

You don’t want to ask questions like, ‘When you think of our brand, do you think of values like sustainability and body positivity?’ What if they think of one but not the other?

Your questions need to be precise. Break them up if necessary, but don’t confuse your respondents. And while we’re at it, that’s also a slightly leading question.

You’re better off asking, ‘What values do you think our brand stands for?’

3. Include A Survey Incentive

Your respondents, who are most likely your customers, get nothing in return for taking your brand perception survey. If your survey is concise, with close-ended questions only, that’s not much of a problem. But if you’re demanding a significant amount of time from your customers, you should pay them back in incentives.

Offering incentives boosts your number of responses and hence gives you better data based on which you can move forward. These incentives also don’t have to come at a significant cost.

Just a tiny discount offer on a product would work. It’ll bring customers to your business and get you the much-valued data from your surveys.

4. Focus only on Brand Perception

Do you know the secret to keeping your brand perception surveys short? It’s not too hard: focus on just that. Don’t go into other things like customer experience or product design.

Surveys get longer than they need to when they try to do more than they need to. In this survey, you aim to find out your brand perception. Stick to that aim.

This might mean you’re conducting more surveys, but only when necessary. If you’re not focused on revamping your product, you don’t need questions about your product quality at this stage.

Keeping your surveys goal-oriented will help you prioritize what matters and, what’s more, get you more responses.

Wrapping Up

Whether as a first step to designing a new marketing campaign or a routine practice, you can never go wrong with conducting brand perception surveys.

We started out aiming to tell you everything you know about how to conduct a survey, and we hope we’ve been able to do that.

At Surveysparrow, we’re committed to making your survey experience, from marketing your survey to analyzing the data, as easy as possible.

With SurveySparrow’s easy-to-use brand perception survey templates, you’ll be ready to conduct a successful survey. Kickstart with beautifully designed online surveys that appeal to respondents, we can fetch 40% more responses than other online survey tools. Begin now! Sign up for FREE!

Start your journey towards better brand perception with a survey and discover counterintuitive insights to help you thrive!